Jack of All Trade, in this Masquerade
by i-prefer-the-term-antihero
Summary: Jack's stream of consciousness describes how society is like a masquerade, while his dreams show his own hypocrisy
1. The Sound of Insanity

**Notes**

For Phmonth18, Week 3, Prompt/Day 2: Mask.

What started out as something that was supposed to be a short little fic about Jack's internal monologue became an in-depth look into Jack's psyche…hehe. I'll admit, this is one of the weirdest formats I've ever used, and I'm not quite sure if it works, but I had fun with it! This is my first time writing heavily about Jack, and it's about how his mind works….so forgive me if there are any inaccuracies to his character. I also wrote this pretty quickly, so I will likely need to edit it. I also intended to post it as a long oneshot, but the second half was already lacking, and I couldn't do the ending justice in a day, so I decided to post the first section right before Phmonth18 ended.

Some good songs for this fic: "Masquerade" by Jonathan Thulin, and "Welcome to the Masquerade" by Thousand Foot Krutch

* * *

Everyone always wore a mask.

That was how things were, how the world worked. No question. No alternative. No argument you could make to stop it. Like a plague that replaced everyone's faces with the skin of monsters.

The world was a masquerade. A dance, where you trade partners, and you never quite know who you're dancing with anyways. You're thrown in without knowing the moves, and are required to learn as you go, because you can't stop. If you stop, the music, the momentum of the world turning, doesn't. So if you do, you may just be trampled, thrown off the world.

As you grew up, you learned the moves, programed them into your bones until the motions were mechanical, and your body knew nothing else. Nothing but the lies. Grew up, painted your mask, made it more ornate, less likely to show your true colors, less likely to fall.

Something that made a louder crash when it did fall.

They always do. Eventually. Don't think you can escape it.

Your parents, your family, your friends, they're no different. When I said everyone, I meant everyone.

But when you grow up in gutters, in the stench and blood, the offal of humanity, and watch from afar, forbidden from the dance, but also from..._not_ dancing, learning that you _must_ to learn the dance to survive, to make in it the world, you may or may not grow to hate humanity.

I _couldn't_ wear a mask. But I was doomed to see through everyone else's. See their lies, see their hypocrisy, their cold cut rules about how much of a clown you could be, I could see the puppet strings.

I learned to hate.

But.

* * *

The room glittered and gleamed. The chandeliers, the polished marble tiles, the wine glasses, the clothing of the dancers, and his smile.

Jack stood on the sidelines. The black and white players spinning before him, coming near him in flashes and fake smiles.

Outside, snow fluttered down onto a darkened ground, he couldn't see past the wind and flakes to a world beyond. He had to stay inside, or else the storm might overtake him.

Storm inside. Storm out. Between two evils, how do you know which is worse?

They didn't know they were simply chess pieces. That this was simply a game, that they would be sacrificed, all for the sake of the king.

Once, he had found their twirls and fanciful garments fascinating; the masks shined and their feathers climbed towards a twinkling ceiling. He looked on with longing, then.

Now, the word _fake_ grew out of the crevices where their eyes were meant to be, it crept along their porcelain cheeks, their feathered heads, their bejeweled necks—and they didn't see the vines, the spiders, linked together into chains, strangling them, driving fangs into their chests.

At the same time, sickness pooled in his own heart, started creating ripples towards his thoughts, reaching his words, crashing upon the shores of his actions.

A sickness called hate.

It took him far too long to realize the motions held no meaning. They were all just tumbling in the dark and the cold, trying to make meaning of the moves when there is none. The shimmer on the surface of the water was reflected from a sky they could never reach, not something buried beneath that they could touch, hold, and keep, if they just held their breath long enough.

The same was surely true for the waters in his own heart.

At least, that's how it seemed, and what he told himself.

Black and white. No color. Pawns and knights in a grand game of chess.

What was real?

What would happen if it all just…stopped? What if we called the world, the dance by name?

A pause. A flicker. A flash. _Color._

First it was red. Red like lamplight, in the night-soaked brightness of the room, a lantern of hope, guiding him across the lifeless waters to a land where there was more light like hers. Red that burned—_could it burn down the masks?_ Like blood. Like roses.

Red in her eyes.

Then it was her hair, a splash of brown, flowing between the sides of black and white.

Then the violet of her dress, like she was the only royal in a council of fools, and common sense.

He lost track of the moves to stare her way.

* * *

One day, as I met a girl—brown hair, eyes red as roses in the snow—who wasn't wearing a mask. She told me she could see through the masks too. But instead of hating the world in general for the practice, she questioned, she wondered, and she cheated the game.

And looking into those red eyes, I realized nothing else mattered. Not the world, not the deadened grasp of humanity, the music, the moves, or the masks.…Just her.

I tried to follow her, but in the mix of feet, in the unlearned motions, I myself was trampled to the ground.

So I resolved to learn the dance—not to live, not for the dance itself—but to follow her. To trade partners until I found her hand. I had to get up, to sew together a mask, glue on the feathers with blood, and pull the jewels out of dead men's hands.

Horror is the word, I believe. The one to describe the things I did. I think you'll find that both joining the dance, and subverting it, will inevitably lead to that word. I followed in the steps of people who did worse than me. Danced with partners whose masks were sewn into the skin. I did things that'll make you shudder to think.

All part of the dance.

_ Nothing but her._

* * *

Outside, silent snow turned to to the taps of rain, asking to get in.

As he stared the girl's way, the other dancers knocked against his shoulders, they trod on his feet, and scoffed at his incredulity.

He looked over their shoulders, trying to catch another glimpse of the one real thing in the sea of falsity.

She faded.

Fear, desperation set into to his fast-beating heart.

And, at last, he moved.

Out from the sidelines, into the mix of motions.

But instead of following the ordained pattern, he was a wrench in the perfectly predestined machine.

The other cogs knocked into him, he tripped into the workings, fell to the tiles beneath, was kicked by the steps, and lay beneath, watching the movements of the gears ticking above him.

_"Lacie!"_ he reached out for her.

And on the floor, his gaze on her fading footfalls, he realized that that the pattern was too ruthless to break. Kicked and beaten by the dance, he realized that the only way to follow her, was to join the dance itself.

He wouldn't give up. He'd follow her footprints through the forest of feet and fakes.

If he'd bend the rules a little.

* * *

After a long time of setting the moves into my hands and feet, the day came when my hand found hers.

She…didn't remember me.

No peppered, cheerful hello. No pretense, or pretending.

No mask.

My free spirit. My unmasked beauty. My blood red girl. My Lacie.

In eight years, she still hadn't changed, been chained; she was still the same dash of color in a world of black and white fakes. A player in a world of pawns.

Despite all the things I had done, I knew she was the one person who would still accept me.

The time we spent together after that, the days in the sun…I never wanted it to end.

But.

* * *

After the moving maze, the muddied world of men, the journey to get back to her, his hand found hers.

Something real, something dynamic, instead of stagnant, something warm to the touch, not metallic and cold.

Standing before him—at last—was his pride, his prize.

She was on the other side of the endless ballroom, off to the side, her head turned, gaze out the window. But she was still dancing with someone. Slowly, their moves less cold and mechanical.

He didn't bother with the pretense of the dance, or courtesy towards the one she was currently dancing with. He threw his arms around her, and held her tight.

The shock in her eyes told him something wasn't quite the same.

—(Or maybe he wasn't quite sane)—

Did she not remember him? That moment when color entered his world?

What was all of time for him, was a passing glimpse for her.

It didn't matter. As long as she didn't cover those pretty eyes with the mark of a fake.

And she never did. Not as long as he knew her

_"Jack."_ She placed her hand on his cheek, running her fingers along his skin, pushing a strand of his hair behind his ear.

She smiled, and it was the only real thing in the sea of masks.

But that smile didn't last forever; it became a twisted thing, etching itself onto her features.

A thing that certainly didn't belong to her, even now.

Was this her mask? Could her face have been a mask this whole time?

She pulled away from him.

_"You fool."_

He drew in a sharp breath, and it pierced his heart.

_"You really don't see it, do you?"_

She gestured grandly to the room as a whole.

_What?_ What didn't he see? This was how it had always been. Nothing had changed.

She grabbed his chin and made him look away from her.

_"Look_ _at them."_

Then he saw.

The dancers around them weren't just dancers, strangers, background.

They weren't strangers at all.

Or maybe they were even less known to him than strangers would have been.

Many of them were wearing the same green outfit he wore presently, others were in red, and blue, some wrapped in a thin blanket…They all had the same blonde hair, sometimes in a braid like his, others messy and short. And they all still wore masks, as if the emotions could be written and plastered on rather than felt—happy, sad, angry…that disgusting smile…

_His_ disgusting smile.

Each and every one of them was himself.

Had it always been this way? Since the beginning? Or had they become this way? Somewhere in the middle, had strangers morphed into mirrors?

The music faded out, and the rain outside grew louder and louder until he couldn't help but turn to the window, as if to demand some peace and quiet.

The drops that dribble down, and splattered across, the panes were not clear, or grey, or blue.

That red he had once found so fascinating, once begged for, was painting the world.

He swallowed.

As he realized the change in scenery, all the other Jacks stopped, turning to him with mechanical motions, and faceless expressions, some creepy army of past-self-dolls.

_"Lacie,"_ her name on his lips, he turned to her, his one hope, his one safety in a world that had fixed its canons against him.

She was no longer beside him.

Laying in his hand was a limp chain.

He didn't want to look, to follow the trail; he feared what he would see. But he chased the links to the ceiling—

Her body, suspended in the air above, like she was one of those twinkling chandeliers. Her body, pierced by chains.

That red rain was inside now.

And below her, looking his way, was someone else. Someone who wasn't wearing a mask.

* * *

My Lacie, who lied, and died at the hands of her brother. For the simplest crime of never wearing a mask over those red eyes. For the simplest crime of existence.

Oswald. Her brother.

I should have hated him, perhaps. For taking her from me.

And there was a part of me that did. Surely. But he loved her too, you know. And it was some sick sense of duty that threw her into the pit, not his own will.

I was a question in his eyes, and he was an answer in mine. There's something about mutual darkness between people; being able to look into someone else's soul, and see your struggles reflected, and yet…not yourself… Something that we call friendship.

* * *

The first thing he saw was his cloak, like a wave, breaking across his shoulder. Crimson, just like her eyes.

Just like her blood he spilt.

Then his eyes, violet, like her dress. A violet that was sharp, and cold, and unforgiving as a winter storm. Then it was the black of his hair and clothing. A deeper black from the dancers before. A darker sky.

He was the black king, after all, wasn't he?

_"Lacie is dead,"_

_ "I killed her."_

* * *

It wasn't malice, or revenge. It was the requirement of a leader.

Or at least, they poisoned his mind, and made him think so.

I'm sure he would have joined me, if he wasn't such a fool. If he wasn't so wrapped up in his own ignorance.

(An ignorance that was my fault).

Joined me to get her, that is.

Death isn't quite the right word. She was cast into the Abyss, into a place where no return.

But I learned that the masks, the dance, the masquerade, goes by another name:

Chains.

Chains come in many forms. There are the chains that killed her, the ones that we create contracts with. Chains between people, and the chains we create for ourselves.

Then there's another type; this world is a ruin—(I always knew it)—and the Chains around it are the only things keeping the world from the Abyss. They fall between the lines on the pages of our story, into the places our eyes can't see.

Or, more accurately, keeping the world from _her_.

Blood red world. My gift for my blood red girl. And I didn't care how blood I spilled in the midst. Not really. Not enough.

This world is rotting anyway. I've known it from the start. But not to her. She saw the light. She saw the stars. She saw that there was something real behind those shimmering lights. That maybe it wasn't all on the surface. Maybe there was something beneath the waters that we could reach.

And I'd bring the world she loved to her.

_ I'm doing this for you._


	2. The Color of Tragedy

The scene shifted, paint on a canvas smearing, and Glen became a black satin stain beneath layers of paint, the crimson and commanding presence disappearing as the world rearranged itself.

The many Jacks faded into the background too, until he couldn't tell if they remained mirrors—(mirrors hidden within the many halls and rooms, built within the walls of his heart)—or if they were strangers and friends again; other people, not himself.

The pillars to the ballroom slowly dissolved, as if in water, changing into a courtyard green sprouting up all around.

The music had always been an unfamiliar tune he was expected to inherently know the moves to. And no matter how much he listened to it, it never became innate. Now, after all this time, it morphed into something familiar. But familiar did not mean un-painful or un-maddening.

The soft tune of a pocket watch tiptoed on his brain, each footfall a syringe in his thoughts, dripping cold beautiful insanity slowly into his soul, one drop at a time, infecting it until it blocked out every other melody, and his feet forgot the moves he had so ruthlessly sewn in.

When he turned, the source was behind him; a man standing in the courtyard. All black now; black hair, black cloak. No crimson. Like he never spilt her blood. Like she never existed in the first place. All black…except for the eyes. Gaze fluctuating between daggers…and some emotion he was struggling to keep from escaping; the leader, and the broken boy, crying on the ground. Soot with sparks buried within; glints of violet, glints of gold. Glitches of empathy in the perfect program. His eyes focused on the pocket watch—(a glint in the dark itself)—until they flicked to him, and Jack felt those eyes as a sword at his throat.

At the shift in his gaze, the scene itself turned over again, wind blowing by him, a single spark of violet glowing in the blurred tapestry, and ever, ever that melody, slowly corroding him.

Glen sat in the grass on a sunny day, those violet blades sheathed as he bathed in the afternoon sunlight.

The first respite from the dance in all these years. A rest in the measure.

Glen, sitting in the sunlight. Glen, playing the piano—always that single, haunting melody, laced with a name, filling up Jack's mind with the harmony until he was drowning in its sound, and could think no other word.

That melody, that word, and her voice—(A memory of her voice, soon given to him by a bloodstained black rabbit)—pulling him through the blurred universe to a balcony, drawn there like he was ink on a canvas, subject to the whims of the artist.

Brown hair, like hers.

Violet eyes, like his.

White dress.

Black dress.

Her existence was not tied down. As if it was a part of the smear itself, and not the concrete picture beneath it. She was a part of all these mistakes the artist tried to smudge out.

Jack pulled a white rose from his pocket.

He offered her a red rose.

_"Would you care to dance, Alice?"_

* * *

A little girl held the keys to those chains—held them, held _by_ them all the same; that is to say her world would fall into the dark too, if the bounds were to break. A little girl chose the music, the steps. A little girl ruled the world.

Is that why they call it insanity?

Her daughter.

Gods may be fixed in the sky, watching all our misdeeds, and we believe in them, not they us, but children can be made to believe anything. Such as: men who come down the chimney do so to give them presents, that putting their teeth beneath pillows is anything more than gross. One can make them believe the world isn't made of malice. You can make them believe you haven't sewn your mask—and the things you stole to get those jewels, things like lives—into the skin. You can make them think you're a hero coming to save them, make them more than a blur, a mistake, a prisoner of their own creation, but a part of something real and concrete, when you're just using them, like everyone else will. Naiveté is powerful and dangerous in that way.

I heard her voice one day. Lacie's. Not just in my memories. This was real, one piece of her reaching out to me from the black.

She had this toy rabbit. A toy, yes, but to a god, a toy can be a thinking, living, breathing, thing, with nothing more than a thought to animate it. Dolls and figures can be princesses and princes, and their knights and soldiers. Children dream. And lonely children dream the most. And a lonely god is a dangerous thing indeed. Especially a child god, surrounded by lifeless toys. Dangerous, because of the stories they tell themselves in the silence can become real indeed.

It was this toy that brought her voice to me, like a gift, physical thing. Packaged up a memory and sent it off to me.

So it was back to the dance. But this time it was different. Because even if there were other melodies out there somewhere, other moves to know, my ears only heard one twinkling pocket watch, my feet would only obey one conductor.

And this melody was not bound by little girls, and lonely gods, and broken, blood struck leaders. This one I could make up my own moves to, intertwine them with the motions and melodies of the rest of the world, so no one would know I was dancing to my own song.

This rabbit, the one who brought her voice to me had a name. Oz—(like Oswald…but not like him at all)—was to be my chain. A chain different from the rest. A chain that was not friendship, or love, or hate, or malice. A chain that was not sanity or insanity. A chain that was not keeping the world upright. A chain to break all other chains. Bringing her to me. Tying me to her. My chain, to destroy all the chains keeping me from hearing her voice again, and her from the world she loved.

A god who creates something that can destroy their world is dangerous indeed.

Little girls and their dolls, toy rabbits and puppet kings, a tear or two, and some spilled blood couldn't stop me now.

* * *

The world blurred in black and white, gold and red, violet and green.

Which color was real?

Was it the black and white; just the game of chess?

Was it the endless violet in the king's eyes?

The gold of shimmering lights, and the eyes of scared little boys just trying to help?

Was it the green, the vibrant, envious green of his clothes, his eyes?

Or was it all the red they spilled?

And there was. So much red. One could have painted with it. He did. The floors. The walls. The roses he once promised she'd see. The world.

But even within those colors… nothing was quite solid, quite sure.

Because the gold didn't shimmer anymore. Those golden eyes were full of fear, determination. They didn't gleam with false riches, but with real poverty; a poverty that comes not from losing your money, but losing your friends, or your sanity.

Because that green wasn't the vibrant bloom of a garden. It was not envy or eternity or ephemerality and it—he—too was dyed with red.

Because when Oswald truly put a sword to Jack's throat his eyes held no sting. Those violet blades held nothing more than infinite sorrow. He called him his friend. But he saw him at the end of a sword, at the end of themselves, at the end of the world.

Or at least, that was Jack's goal.

But the king made sure the only world that ended was their own, cutting off the hand for the sake of the rest of the body. Gouging out the eye for the sake of the face.

And there was another Jack trapped within the reflection on the sword—(mask or real?)—looking like a broken thing determined to hold itself together. And when something gets to that point, is broken enough…it doesn't care. About much of anything. Not itself. Not the friend on the other end. Just whatever it is holding itself together.

The king's head is lying on the board.

_"Glen?"_

Jack is calling his name, cradling his red-stained head in his hands, tears smearing the green of his eyes.

How did he die? Who killed him? How can he make them pay?

But his hands are covered in blood.

What's the mask? The blood? Or the tears?

And now everything, once too blurred, once just a smear on a canvas, a move in the midst of a dance, is too real, too concrete, too irreversible.

Checkmate. But he doesn't feel like he's won the game.

And as he cries, as he screams and demands why, the masks peer out of the corners of the board, stare his way, snickering at him from the hidden passageways deep inside him.

The closer he got to his goal, the more those chains fell apart, finally creating his own moves to the dance…the less he he noticed something wrapping around his arms, his legs.

He rushed to the tower where the god-girl will grant his wishes at last—the bottle for the genie—where he will be free.

And she would have granted him all, if only he would have freed her from her bottle.

She wouldn't have hesitated to destroy the world for him.

Were it not for her other half, the rabbit's tears, and a pair of scissors.

At last the machine remembers the wrench; the one that tried to change the patterns, the melody, long ago, all for a single distortion in the system that shouldn't have been there in the first place. The one whom its gears once kicked to the bottom, the one who clawed his way back up. And it knows kicking him back down there again won't be enough.

Fine. If he wanted to change the system, the dance, the melody, then the system would exclude him, treat him as an error. The dance will leave him with everything he wanted, everything he was, everything he created.

He opens his eyes.

There is no ballroom. No dance. No dancers. …Maybe there never was.

A cell. Or at least, he thinks it is, but he doesn't see any walls or floors, just navy darkness, and a crack in the dimension above, like a slit in the prison door, letting in the tiniest bit of light.

He takes a step.

There's a sloshing noise.

So there's water in the bottom of this cell. Is the prison's being flooded? He ought to tell the guards.

One more step.

Something cuts the air. A terrible sound; like somebody took a beautiful thing and melted it down, and melded it into something it was never meant to be.

Laughter. Twisted, reckless, mirthless, soulless laughter. As if he stepped on a malfunctioning Jack-in-the-box, with no need for the song.

There's no music anymore. And the the absence of it threatens to suffocate him.

Another step, another laugh, different, but no less jagged.

He doesn't want to look down. Doesn't want to see. To face it. He knows. He knows what he'll find there.

But he does it anyways.

Beside his foot is a mask. A fine porcelain one, like from a theater, that would cover the whole face. The slit-eyes are curved down, the mouth curved up, to signify happiness.

It's the ugliest thing he's ever seen.

But he knows, if he were to put it on, it would fit his handsome face perfectly.

He puts a hand over his mouth to barricade the sick, to cloister his silver tongue, and takes a step back.

But when he does, another warped sound wrenches open the air. This time it's crying.

He spins around. His heel is on another mask.

But, as he looks upon it, his eyes are pulled upward as if on strings. There is something far worse behind him. It's like a snowy mountain.

Masks, endless, empty, lifeless masks. This place is surely built upon them.

All the masks he ever wore.

Does he even have a face anymore?


End file.
